New Public Management and E-Government: Trajectories of a Marriage between Managerial and Technological Reform in Government

摘要

Bureaucracy is a bad word in the beginning of the 21st century. Despite its idealtypical characteristics of efficient operations and ubiquitous (political) accountability, actual manifestations of public bureaucracies may result in slow operations, diminished citizen orientation and less than perfect responsiveness. In a sense, ICT can be accused of being an accomplice this situation. Nohria and Berkley state that until recently, "[c]omputer systems and software adopted the 'architecture' of bureaucracy [...]. Not surprisingly the language of information systems became the language of bureaucracy" (Nohria & Berkley, 1994: 120). In is not surprising then, that over the last decades, the concept of bureaucracy, as embodied in the 'classic' public administration paradigm (Behn, 2001), has been contested and reshaped by a variety of managerial and technological reforms. 'New public management' (Behn, 2001; Osborne & Gaebler, 1992) has resulted in emphasis on the ideas of expediency, efficiency and economy (Pollitt, 2000). Furthermore, e-government has emerged (Fountain, 2001). A successful marriage seems to emerge from two types of reform (Bellamy & Taylor, 1998; Heeks, 2001). However, both types of reform refer to very broad patterns of change and therefore, claims of concordance or resentments of directions of managerial and technological innovations taking place in the public sector at this moment may be unjustified.